Sign in

Washington Wizard

The capital crime novels of George P. Pelecanos.

Someone, maybe me, should publish a Hollywood-homes-of-the-stars-type map of America's premier crime novelists, complete with oval-shaped portraits of the authors displayed above the areas they chronicle. James Ellroy and Walter Mosley would preside over Los Angeles. Jon A. Jackson would occupy Detroit. Miami would be crowded, with James W. Hall, Carl Hiaasen, Edna Buchanan, and perhaps even a small black-and-white of Charles Willeford, for old times' sake. And somewhere over Washington, D.C., there would be a large picture of George P. Pelecanos.

“Hell to Pay” (Little, Brown; $24.95) is his tenth crime novel in the past decade, and, like the rest, it's set in and around the District. But Pelecanos's Washington has little to do with murder on the Mall or dirty deeds in Foggy Bottom. It is a rough patch of urban real estate populated by guttersnipes, snitches, dealers, and rapists—and by plenty of decent and hardworking citizens who have to stand by and watch as their neighborhoods go to hell.

Most of those citizens are African-American, like most of Washington. Many others are Greek-American, like Pelecanos. In the first phase of Pelecanos's career, back in the early nineties, the Greek community dominated his books; the early novels focussed on a young Greek-American detective named Nick Stefanos, who attempted to solve small-time crimes as he coped with alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse. Written in the first person, with evident debts to the Big Three of American detective literature (Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald), the Stefanos novels were critical successes, and showed much of Pelecanos's sensibility already in place. For example, Pelecanos wasn't interested in having his hero work exclusively as a P.I.; Nick developed his interest in snooping while laboring as a cut-and-paste adman for a chain of local electronics stores. This was realism, but also autobiography; Pelecanos himself had a long blue-collar résumé before he published his début novel, at the age of thirty-five, having worked as a short-order cook, dishwasher, bartender, appliance-store clerk, and shoe salesman. All these occupations surface in his plots.

After a brief foray into more straightforward pulp fiction, Pelecanos published “The Big Blowdown” (1996), an ambitious and layered mystery set in the nineteen-forties and fifties. (It made a hardboiled hero out of Nick Stefanos's grandfather.) “The Big Blowdown,” which won several international crime-fiction prizes, was a bona-fide historical novel. It reënergized Pelecanos, sharpening his archivist's eye and allowing him to focus on the sociological shifts that remade D.C. over the decades. His next book, “King Suckerman” (1997), was his masterstroke: a revved-up, flashy tribute to the big-Afro seventies. Set during the Bicentennial summer of 1976, it introduced two new heroes, Marcus Clay, a black Vietnam vet who owned a record store in inner-city D.C., and Dimitri Karras, a Greek-American friend of Marcus's who, like Nick Stefanos, had problems controlling his addictions. “King Suckerman” looked at D.C. from the roots up, with lovingly nostalgic scenes of playground basketball and late-night driving shattered by episodes of violent bloodletting. Pelecanos wasn't as hilariously deadpan as Elmore Leonard or as dourly intense as Dennis Lehane, but his characters, even the villains, were motivated by a mixture of self-interest and existential despair which made the battle between good and evil unusually compelling. It also allied him more with authors like James Crumley, Pete Dexter, and the early Richard Ford than with traditional thriller writers. Despite the shotgun-toting baddies and the latticework of double crosses, Pelecanos was writing entirely satisfying adult novels that also happened to be brisk beach reads.

Marcus and Dimitri stayed on for two more tours, moving through the cokehead eighties in “The Sweet Forever” (which was keyed to the drug overdose of the University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias following the 1986 N.B.A. draft) and the bleak nineties in “Shame the Devil” (in which Karras, having found some domestic happiness, loses it when his five-year-old son is killed in a holdup). But the closer Karras and Clay got to the present, the less vibrant they became. Marcus, always the more stable of the two, had mastered most of his demons, and Dimitri's fragility had ceased to pay dividends.

Pelecanos created a new pair of detectives for “Right as Rain,” his ninth novel, which came out last year. Derek Strange was a black ex-cop in his mid-fifties who had carved out a nice little living as a private investigator; Terry Quinn, about twenty years younger than Strange, was also an ex-cop, who had left the force after mistakenly shooting a fellow-officer. At first, Strange and Quinn played like slight returns of Clay and Karras: the white guy was damaged goods who managed to come through in the clutch; the black guy was a pillar of strength shaken by the destruction all around him. But in “Hell to Pay,” the second Strange-Quinn novel, Pelecanos regains his footing; it is at once more powerful and more agile than its predecessor.

As usual, the novel has urban rot at its core. In one of the two main plots, Strange tries to track down the men responsible for the death of a young football player; in the other, Quinn tries to protect a teen-age prostitute from a menacing customer. The external conflicts are echoed by internal ones: Strange is still ducking off for massage-parlor quickies even as he settles into a romance with his office manager, Janine, and Quinn is still coming to terms with the shooting that ended his police career. But the darkness of the previous two books has lifted somewhat. In the opening scene, two dealers wait in a car before a dogfight:

Garfield Potter sat low behind the wheel of an idling Caprice, his thumb stroking the rubber grip of the Colt revolver loosely fitted between his legs. On the bench beside him, leaning against the passenger window, sat Carlton Little. Little filled an empty White Owl wrapper with marijuana and tamped the herb with his thumb. Potter and Little were waiting on Charles White, who was in the backyard of his grandmother's place, getting his dog out of a cage.

The prose is telegraphic: a scaffolding of nouns and verbs, a few load-bearing adverbs, and a near-absence of adjectival frippery. Within three sentences, we have the car, the gun, and the cigar wrapper used for rolling paper: the paragraph has the feel of a police report. And though it's the kind of mentholated prose you might expect to wear out its welcome, it holds up well over the course of the story.

In the classic crime novel, characters are defined by their speech, which can be terse (Jim Thompson, whose dialogue was so brittle it snapped) or self-consciously slangy (Hammett). In Pelecanos, listening is just as important as talking. Especially since “King Suckerman,” which bounced along on a cushion of mid-seventies funk and soul, Pelecanos has seen the world through the prism of pop music; for his characters, the ears rather than the eyes are the windows to the soul. In “Hell to Pay,” the dealers in the opening scene are listening to “the new DMX joint on PGC,” gangsta rap on a D.C. radio station, complete with actual call letters. They're not the only ones marked by their musical tastes. Strange drives around with Teddy Pendergrass crooning on his car stereo, and when it's not Teddy Pendergrass it's Al Green or War. Ron Lattimer, Strange's research assistant, surfs the Net while “some kind of jazz-inflected hip-hop” percolates through his high-end Bose minisystem. And Quinn's romance with a female investigator is consummated to the boozy folk-rock of Shane MacGowan. This may be a predictable sort of cultural accessorizing, but it's surprisingly effective as shorthand, and it leaves Pelecanos room for an occasional bright surprise—at home, for example, Strange likes to put up his feet and lose himself in Ennio Morricone.

In fact, the characters' musical selections function almost like personal soundtracks, and they raise the question of why none of these books have hit the big screen yet. Pelecanos himself, after punching out as a short-order cook and a shoe salesman, started to make inroads into the movie business; in the years before the first Nick Stefanos novel appeared, he began working at Circle Films, a company that produced three early Coen brothers films and brought John Woo's super-violent Hong Kong masterpiece “The Killer” to America. Pelecanos's books never have movies far from their hearts; his characters talk about them as often as they talk about music or sports, and the central plot device of “King Suckerman” is a drive-in screening of a blaxploitation classic which brings all the main characters together for a tense showdown. If there's a movie in “King Suckerman,” why isn't there a movie of “King Suckerman”? Somebody should tender offers to George Clooney and Ving Rhames to play Karras and Clay, and get the party started. The soundtrack is already done. ♦